Tag: Around Town

Historic Stone Bridge Repairs – Final Report

The Hunterdon County Road Department gives some local Delaware news about the realization of its innovative repair of the historic stone culvert on Sandbrook-Headquarters Road. The original stone arch, sagging and partially collapsed, was lifted back into position without dismantling it. Parts of the intrados (the inner barrel of the arch, not the stones you see on the side walls) were lifted up four or five inches, and it is now just the shape it was when new. This is the first time such a technique has been tried around here. The engineers and repair crew are pleased with the result, and enthusiastic about having the new capability. John Glynn, Director of Roads, Bridges, and Engineering, told me: “I was pleasantly surprised, from a structural standpoint” with the success of …

The mills of the Delaware Township

Delaware Township, like all other communities in Hunterdon county, was once Water-fed. All the coves and streams were set to use for mills of several kinds. The Wickecheoke and its tributaries, the Lockatong, and the coves of Alexauken, the Plum Brook and Sand creek, and the branches of the Neshanic all provided power to the mills in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries.

Several years before 1838, when the Delaware township was created by the New Jersey legislature, the settlers in that area were residents of Amwell township, which today included reritan, Flemington, East and West Amwell, Stockton and Lambertville. The first families of Amwell were able to be self-sufficient in most things, but to grind the grain, the solid fabric or the press oil demanded more equipment than the …